I personally don’t believe salvation has anything to do this subject. No one here also, as far as I know, is questioning if God is real, if the Bible is authoritative in some fashion or if the supernatural exists. This whole subject of what does it mean that God is the creator could have been discussed before Moses was even part of the story.
People also like to hide behind…… god was involved somehow…. But then can only state biological reasons….but then they don’t use those same answers for was god involved in me going to the bathroom, or was god involved in kids that have cancer and so on. Now I’m sure, some of y’all do. But many here probably don’t. But they cling to a literalist understanding of the creator and use concordistic reasoning to do it.
The Bible says God controls the weather. We see lots of verses about God seemingly controlling the weather. But most of us don’t think that God is actually somehow guiding hurricanes towards certain areas to kill certain people. We recognize it as hyperbolic, symbolic or accommodating views.
But as soon as you say I think the term creator is also not literal, especially within a non literal poem, they act as if it’s atheism or denying God or deism and so on. It’s not. It’s saying I think it’s not literal and that the Holy Spirit is involved with “creation” in another way. I don’t see any reason to believe in intelligent design. I don’t think god created a plan for us to fail just so he can save us either.
Well, Richard. Whether or not this life is a rite of passage is a topic that could keep us up all night. But life for human beings has a start…and then it comes to some sort of end —no matter how many triathlons one can complete or how sugar-free one’s diet. But death is a door. So I think Adam is referring somewhat to that aspect of things. And Christianity being doomed to failure? That has been said by others – like Voltaire, Lennon, a few prominent members of Hitler’s cabinet, and more, I suppose. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by Me” — Jesus said that.
FYI.
I’m going to go ahead and pull out of this convo and the other one. So don’t think I’m ignoring anyone personally. I’m just ignoring this whole thread. Maybe in a week or so I’ll skim any new contributors who present a different view from what’s been here from me or y’all.
What I mean is that Christianity is a way of living not a ticket to a destination. Concentrating on sin and salvation is distorting the basic message about the right way to live. It is not about punishment or reward, it is about aligning yourself with God and behaving in a manner that is appropriate.(and acknowledging/having a relationship with God)
Thanks for clarifying, Richard. Christianity really does, of course, describe a way of living. But a number of religions do that, without touching on some of the things Jesus said --with His parables about the separation of the sheep and the goats, etc…“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by Me…For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life…a time is coming when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live…a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear the voice and come out…those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.”
and so on and so on…it is about something more than “just the here and now”—and Jesus’ hearers would have recognized that…Very futuristic in a larger sense (the parable of the sheep and the goats…the rich man and Lazarus, however you interpret Revelation, etc etc) , while also discussing life in the here and now.
I am not denying the future, just the obsession with it. Aiming for Heaven makes things very self centred which is the opposite of the general principles of Christian living. The sheep and the goats, for instance, was not about gaining anything, more like losing it. Neither group were really aware of what they had or had not done.
Some of Christ’s hyperbolae was necessary to make the points clear, but the over riding principle of forgiveness tempers the need for either perfection or obsession.
Well…you are right in a way. Some can “be so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.” But that ancient saying is not heard much any more. The “sheep” in Matthew 25 got the kingdom (futurist thinking) because of what they did in the present—fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, and welcomed the stranger —with whom Jesus has always identified. The goats in the parable did none of these “present” things and got tossed (futuristic thinking) into “the eternal fire” along with the devil and his angels. Lucky them! (Not). See Matthew 25. Eternal is a very long time. Presumably these two groups had awareness of what they had or had not done at the time of separation. And when Jesus said He “came as a ransom for many”----I would not say this tempers the need, but rather acknowledges that we have not sought or acheived perfection (“all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”)…but it still seems to have a place —“Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” —and, since perfection is not our special talent, someone (Someone—capital S) took our punishment so that we, if we acknowledge it, do not have to.
As I said…there is a present and future aspect to all of this. Obsession with one or the other might not do one much good. But one instead of the other…is also a bit off base. Well, thanks for the conversation nevertheless!
So for me “creator” is NOT just a title. It means everything came from God intentionally. But our technology is reaching a point where we are beginning to learn that design isn’t always the best way of creating. With AI we are learning that sometimes the best solutions are found when we let something find its own solution. And this is the nature of living things.
This is not to say the creator simply watches. When we use AI for solutions, adjustments are still needed. But no the AI doesn’t simply just disappear if we turn our attention to something else. But somehow people think God isn’t enough of a creator for that. Somehow you have to accept that the clergy are the most important people because they attend to God and without God you and everything else is just going to disappear. Sounds like the sales pitch I see in so many commercials – give me a break!
Also when making worlds in computer games, design is often not the best way of doing things. Design is fine for a visual novel or a limited game where the creator leads the player around by the nose. But for an open world where the players can do anything they want, the best way to create the worlds is procedural generation.
And what do we see in the world around us? We see living things finding their own solutions and we see the creation of terrain and worlds according to procedural generation. It doesn’t mean God isn’t the creator. It just means God is a more clever creator than people understood or were capable of in ancient times. No big surprise there, right?
I see you’re still hanging onto this false dichotomy. It’s kind of like saying that since you can identify all the tools used to build a house then there was no builder – you’re confusing operator and instruments, artist and tools (my brain is yelling at me that there are better terms here).
Is a raindrop not a new thing? is not each cloud new as it forms?
Then GOd is creating the clouds and the rain, since apart from Him nothing gets made.
You can only move so far from a “plain text reading style” before you’ve abandoned the text in all but name.
The end result of this reasoning is that God didn’t do anything and the universe just runs itself and always has.
If God didn’t “literally” create the world, then He didn’t create it, and that throws out the Creation story in Genesis. There’s no such thing as metaphorical or allegorical cause and effect.
It sounds like your goal is to believe as little about God as you can possibly manage, so many of your posts are wabout what you don’t have to believe.
This is especially true since the whole point of one of the literary types that the Creation story fits is intended to tell something that a mighty kind actually did, and since one purpose is polemical, telling Israel that it wasn’t those Egyptian gods who made the universe and everything, it was YHWH-Elohim who made it all, including those gods.
That is not the scriptural definition of “omnipotent”, it’s a speculative philosophy’s definition. When the scriptures speak of God as having all power, they mean that whatever power there is is God’s whether that power is that of a king, of a storm, of a city, of an earthquake. That’s the point Jesus made to Pilate: Pilate had no actual power, he only had what God gave/loaned him.
Salvation is the basic message when it comes to Christianity. How to live is a subset of salvation, which includes everything from the Annunciation to the Parousia; how to live calls under “work out your salvation in fear and trembling”. Indeed as a number of theologians have noted, we can live correctly only because there is salvation; without salvation all we can do is continue to perpetually screw up.
Salvation is about the future being brought to us now – these days I have this mental picture of clicking on a spot on my computer screen labelled “the future” and dragging it over to a dot labeled “me right now”. It’s why so many things are “already but not yet” – they don’t fully happen until the end of things but they most certainly begin happening right now, as in “today is the day”.
Oswald Hoffman, the great Lutheran Hour preacher, once spoke powerfully that we should most certainly be aiming for Heave, with everything we do. But where, he asked, is this heaven we are aiming for? Why, “the kingdom of heaven is in the midst of you”!
The way we aim for heaven is told us in the Lord’s Prayer: making His will be done on Earth as it (already) is in Heaven, and thus we aim at heaven by bringing heaven to those around us.
The problem isn’t that we shouldn’t aim for Heaven, it’s that we tend to locate Heaven as far away and in the future when it’s as close as the guy next to us on the bus. Another way to put it is that to aim for Heaven isn’t to try to get somewhere else, it’s to aim to bring little bits of Heaven into our own lives for the sake of others.
That’s part of the problem with those who keep saying (or insinuating) that Christianity is just about gaining points or whatever for the hereafter. (I would still have mercy on one who was accosted on the road to Jericho though – but the Good Samaritan had it easy: the victim was presumably unconscious or nearly so and couldn’t speak. ; - )
I think cosmology provides a good model of the course the cosmos has taken to become as it is now. It doesn’t and cannot account for why there is anything at all. There is something about the movement of the cosmos which seems to have opted for diversity and complexity. God isn’t a being within creation. “God” is a place holder name for whatever it is which accounts for the advancement from chaos to order and the increasing potential we find all around us. No one can say what God is like or how He does what He does but He has been at it for as far back as we can peer and I don’t see that ceasing no matter how badly we mess up our own neighborhood. God is in everything and also beyond that but I don’t think his mode of creation is best thought of as a feat of engineering.
Of course I have no scriptural evidence for anything as that is not my path. But I find, where multiple paths align, a source of increased confidence in being on a good path, a path that can allow us to align our understanding to a wider more inclusive world. It is the work of Iain McGilchrist which has brought me to see the necessity and value of God even if we do not know exactly of what we speak. This excerpt from the final chapter of The Matter With Things (pp1906-7) is part of why I now think we need the word “God” to understand the world:
In the Biblical story of Moses and the burning bush, God is said to have declared, in most English translations, ‘I am that I am’. Apparently the simplest and most direct translation of the Hebrew words, ehyeh asher ehyeh, is ‘I will be who (or, that which) I will be’. In the Zohar, a body of kabbalistic texts, the appellation ‘I will
be’ (ehyeh) is applied to the highest of the emanations of the infinite by which the cosmos is constantly sustained and created, known as Keter. This indicates, according to Sanford Drob, ‘Keter’s limitless potential, and its wilful movement toward a future.’121 Here I find a close parallel to the view of a God and cosmos that are purposeful, yet undetermined, and each in the process of becoming what they are. (If God is in the cosmos and the cosmos in God, as in panentheism, in such a way that they cannot be wholly separated – though never merely equated – this would naturally follow.)
In the account of the creation contained in the opening of the Book of Genesis, after each act of creation, it records that God looked and ‘saw that it was good’.122 To me this speaks of an encounter with something new, of something free and hitherto undetermined – of veritable creation; not just, as Bergson put it, the unfolding of a fan. What it suggests is that God did not know already that it was good (the Hebrew word can also be translated ‘beautiful’) without having to see it. It speaks of something free, and Other.
Nope – in those terms, it’s a mobius strip and has only one side.
(I once read a short story called “The Mobius Coin”, though all I recall is the title.)
Or that the best point of design is the system, not the items.
Which is the beauty of the Big Bang and evolution and all: the design is in the few “lines of code” that just keep bringing out more variety and mystery and beauty.
I’ve read one too. About a guy who tried to fold his body into a Mobius strip and succeeded. Unfortunately his could hear his muffled cries for help but couldn’t see him, so they couldn’t help him unfold himself. There’s a moral there: Don’t try; you may end up in a position in which neither you nor anyone else can help you out.
Sez you, I’ve heard a lot of them and none of them are worth repeating here.
; - )